Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Chris,

Great job on the site. I love it! OnTwitter and FB do you follow every celebrity chef who loves cheese? I bet there are some bloggers out there that would blog for cheese {I am one of them]. My guess is an inbound link from a celebrity chef or food and wine authority site would be pretty valuable. Ask them if they'd consider linking to you if you sent them some free cheese!

Have you considered adding product reviews? I am pretty sure your E-cart integrates with PowerReviews. We have been using them on a little niche site we launched back in January and I have been very impressed with them. It's only 30 USD/month. If you upgrade to the next level you can actually submit your star ratings to Google so they appear alongside your product listing. Might be something to consider?

Great job on the site,

Dana

Thanks Robert. Ah, I understood now. You are an agency vs. a company looking to hire someone to do SEO in-house. I should have paid more attention.   Yes, I would think if you are training your folks and pay is competitive, holding on to someone shouldn't be that hard. Companies like mine though, that have taken the leap and hired someone in-house always run the risk of spending a lot to train someone up and if that person does become a SEO rockstar, that individual most likely will move on and the company will have to start again with someone else.

Understood on the English major bit. I think the fact that my current SEO project has had so much technical SEO involved, that the writing part falls to someone else who is directed by me. Still, with Google continuing  Penguin updates, is all that SEO-optimized content really getting anyone better rankings? If so, then writing is still important SEO - but for how much longer? A good writer doesn't need to know a lick of SEO to be a good writer.  If SEO-optimized copy isn't helping to improve rankings, build links, etc. , then the technical aspects of SEO will become more important. By technical SEO i mean page speed, proper coding, crawlability, index ability, site architecture, CRO, accessibility, Web design and usability.

Whew! That was amouthful! All that being said...

The MS program in Internet Marketing at Full Sail was just that, Internet Marketing. We only spent 1 month out of the entire year on SEO, so for those students who came into the program knowing very little, they probably left knowing very little. SEO has always been where my interests and passions lay, so I studied that and Analytics whether we were doing coursework on it or not.

Thanks Donnie. I watched an read both of these, which were quite good, but still, neither one addressed where is best to post the video transcript. I noticed that SEOMoz actually puts the entire video transcript right on their page. However, for us, posting an entire transcript on a product page just isn't probably the best idea, particuarly for long videos.

I did surmise that using the <iframe>transcript that DotSub.com provides is fairly useless because Google won't crawl the iframe, consequently not crawling the transcript.</p> <p>Ideally, it would be great to include an interactive transcript on the page via a scrolling text box so it doesn't dominate the entire product page. Has anyone done or tried this?</p> <p>*Update - As I was poking around and reading Donnie's recommendations, which were excellent I also found Sean Lind's tool that will automatically build YouTube embed code that contains a link back to your site (instead of YouTube). It was so cool I thought I'd better include it here: <a href="http://www.seanlind.com/poker-blog/geek/youtube-video-backlink-embedding-tool/">http://www.seanlind.com/poker-blog/geek/youtube-video-backlink-embedding-tool/</a></p> <p>I still haven't got any specific recommendations on where is the best place to post a trascript on a product page....all suggestions welcome!</p></iframe>

I just posted a question as a comment on this blog post (http://www.audiotranscription.org/6-reasons-you-need-to-have-your-sites-videos-transcribed/comment-page-1/#comment-4311) and realized I probably should have asked the question here because it is really SEO-related.

We are in the process of transcribing all of our videos. Can you someone recommend how best to post the transcript file on our product pages? For example, here's a product page that has a video review on it: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/behringer-x32-digital-mixing-system.  Would it be best to  post a link to the transcript file or insert the iframe transcript file from DotSub.com (in that case wouldn't DotSub.com be getting credit for our original content?) or, should we just let our captions on the YouTube stream from there (which is what's happening right now)? Will Google still crawl the transcript if the only place it's available is on YouTube? If so, doesn't YouTube get credited for that content, and not our site?  Even if we do post a trascript on the page, if it appeared at YouTube first, wouldn't YouTube get credit for the original version?

We want credit for that content...just not sure how to get it?

I understand that moving to Wistia.com would probably solve most of these issues. What I'm trying to figure out is how best to handle new transcripts for existing videos over at YouTube?

Yes Greg, absolutely agreed. Linking to a page that has a 404 is a wasted linking opportunity. Not good for spiders or humans. Cesar, for your own reference, there is a great Chrome extension that crawls pages and identifies 404s. It's quite handy. Here's the info http://www.seomoz.org/blog/check-my-links-chrome-extension-a-link-builders-dream

This is a great question. I am a lot like you, except I don't get stuck on certain things that revolve around Google Webmaster Tools. Here's my advice:

1. 404's are GOOD - OK, everyone gets 404s. I work for a large e-commerce site. We have 404s everywhere. The answer? Create a custom 404 page that is consistentwith your overall branding that, in a friendly way, leads people somewhere useful.

2. Do you have a dynamic site? Then technical HTML errors abound I am sure. Learn to know which ones are ccsting you link juice (use SEOMoz's Open Site Explorer to identify duplicate content)/ Bend over backwards to resolve your duplicate content issues.

3. Depending on your platform, take duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate title tags with a grain of salt.

I have one store on the 3dcart platform right now. On this platform, it's impossible to customize meta titles and meta descriptions for .asp pages. You have no choice but to ignore errors coming from .asp pages from sites on that platform. [Never mind the fact that they are trying to sell you SEO services]

Be patient, keep studying, keep working and you'll deliver the best results possible for you client.

I received my MS degree in Internet Marketing from Full Sail University in July, 2010. My background was in classical music (DMA from University of Illinois, 1993). I can speak from personal experience that the program, the professors and my colleagues in the Internet Marketing degree program were superb. I completely disagree that writing skills are the most important for SEOs. Good SEOs are people who have the unique ability to be both right and left-brained. I am currently the in-house SEO Strategist at CCI Solutions in Olympia, WA. Prior to that I was the in-house SEO for Kingdom, Inc. in Mansfield,PA. They promoted me after I received my degree, but their competitor, CCI, hired me away from them.  Don't get me wrong, I write a lot of content too, but hiring a English major to do your SEO would be a big mistake (IMHO). The company I am doing SEO for now is facing a myriad of technical SEO issues. They have loads and loads of great content, but still they thought their content was a problem. Sure, it needed some improvement, content always does. But they have such a long laundry list of technical SEO problems (i.e. meta refresh on the homepage, duplicate content from old domains, malformed URLs, improperly managed 301-redirects),  that all of this is still completely undermining any content production they do. You aren't going to find a writer capable of managing a project to fix those issues because it's foreign to them. You need a real SEO. Someone who can walk that fine line between science and art. Everyone's a little different. Everyone in the Full Sail program had different skill sets. Some were CEOs, some were Web developers, some were Web designers...Just keep in mind that Internet Marketing and SEO are really two different things. There are people who are good at one but not the other. There are people who are good at both. Ask a lot of questions specific to your business and SEO challenges and hold out for the right person. Ask who they follow in the SEO community. Ask them what tools they use. Ask them about their previous projects.

Keep this in mind. If you do hire an English major and train them in SEO, and they get really good at it., you will have just trained them for somebody else, because they will most likely leave. Hire a skilled SEO with experience. If you can't afford one, consider outsourcing to a company with great credentials like SEER Interactive, Distilled, SEOFlow, Blue Glass, AimClear...etc. There really are lots of good ones.

Hope this helps!

Dana

Hi Devinder,

Definitely 100% get rid of that Meta refresh. I am just now dealing with this exact same problem on a large site for which I do in-house SEO. Try this, put the URL http://agaalpet.com into Open Site Exporer and compare it to http://akaalpet.com/default.aspx

Thanks very much to Jenn Lopes at SEOMoz I was able to articulate to management why this was bad and worth spending (in our case) $1,000 to have it fixed.

You are fragmenting the authority of what is probably your most authoritative page by having the meta refresh. It's definitely not OK in Google's eyes because people used to use it for nefarious purposes [SPAM]. Here's a screenshot. See how it's fragmenting your links? Oh heay, one other important thing is that your most authoritative page, http://www.akaalpet.com isn't passing any of it's link juice down to your other pages. The meta refresh is causing that too. Hope that helps!

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Great response and I agree with Big. Large e-commerce sites with thousands of SKUs that often only have tiny difference from one product to the next are bound to have many similar product descriptions. Yes, Amazon is a perfect example. Google is smart enoug to know if what you are doing with your two sites is "an attempt to get 2 bites of the cherry." It's pretty clear that you are trying to serve the most appropriate content to the most appropriate audience. Content management would be easier with everything all on one site, but with the history of these sites, it's probably best to keep them as they are. INow, if you had two domains in either the US or UK that had all the same identical product pages, that would be an issue.

Our site has over 100 great videos. We are currently streaming them all from our YouTube channel. I noticed  SEOMoz is using http://www.wistia.com and that when I copy and paste a video from SEOMoz that code has a link back to the SEOMoz site in it, which of course is awesome for SEO.

My question has several parts:

Is this possible to do with an embed code from YouTube?

Specifically directed towards SEOMoz: Which of the 3 types of player did you choose, HTML5, Flash or javascript? Why?

Is Wistia just creating a video feed, or are they actually hosting your video content too?

Our goal is two-fold: 1. We want people who embed our videos to be also embeddding a link back to our site and 2. We want our videos to be found in SERPs and have those direct people to our site instead of our YouTUbe channel.

I'd welcome any comments regarding video SEO in this thread. Thanks!

How old is your site? Is it an e-commerce site? How many URLs? Have you always had the same domain name? The reason I ask these questions is because I am seeing the same thing on our site. We have many technical issues probably contributing to this. Some of them might be the same if we have similar sites.

Thanks Prasad for all your help. And thank you to Ersin also. We have solved the problem. Apparently, our URL re-write at the TomCat level was taking precedence over the .htaccess file. Once our IT director added the appropriate redirect for these domain pages into the URL re-write file, the problem was fixed and those pages now render with a 301-redirect to the correct page one the correct domain. I have encouraged him to write a blog post about this and put it here because there was very little documentation online about TomCat redirects tasking precedence over an .htaccess file.

Thanks Prasad,

We tried your suggestion because there was a lot of stuff [1220 lines of code] in our .htaccess file. We stripped everything out except your code, and still had the same problem. Our IT director is wondering if perhaps there is a conflict between the .htaccess file that operates at the Apache level and the URL rewirte file which operates at the TomCat level. He is wondering, does one of them take precedence over the other? In other words, could our URL re-write file be causing the redirects in the .htaccess file to not work properly?

I am thinking maybe we need to hire someone to look at the code in both files in order to figure out where and why we are having a conflict?

Dana

Thanks to both Ersin and Prasad. I appreciate your efforts to help very much. My IT director tried both versions of code without success. Here is exactly what he wrote:

" I tried the suggestions without success. I even moved the ccisound
redirects to the top of the file thinking that some other redirect was grabbing
it first, But no go, same results. Top level redirected, lower level not."

Any suggestions as to why neither code succeeded at creating a "catch all." ?

Thanks Ersin,

Can you explain how your coding suggestion is different from Prasad's? I am not a coder so am just wondering if there's a different methodology behind the two suggestions?

Yes, a catch-all makes sense to me. what is the difference between your code suggestion and the one just below posted by Ersin A. ? Also, just for our own understanding, can you explain why the code we were using wasn't accomplishing what we wanted? (I just want to be able to explain it to our Web team). Thanks!

We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com  - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com  The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like:

http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators  do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators  but as you can see it does not.

Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem:

RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!

Thanks Donnie. This answers part of my question. But I am still wondering about three different product pages being diverted somehow to this odd version of the homepage. How could this be accomplished from a technical standpoint without doing a 301-redirect?

It looks like a potential competitor already owns: miamiwaterfront.com

However: waterfrontmiami.com is available. 6,600 local monthly searches, but only medium competition. I would buy it.

I am seeing “Duplicate Page Content” coming up in our
reports on SEOMOZ.org

Here’s an example:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/williams-sound-ppa-r35-e

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/aphex-230-master-voice-channel-processor

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/AT-AE4100.prod

These three pages are for completely unrelated products.
They are returning “200” status codes, but are being identified as having
duplicate page content. It appears these are all going to the home page, but it’s
an odd version of the home page because there’s no title. I would understand if these pages 301-redirected to the home page if they were obsolete products, but it's not a 301-redirect. The referring page is
listed as: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators

None of the 3 links in question appear anywhere on that page. It's puzzling. We have 132 of these. Can anyone help me figure out
why this is happening and how best to fix it?  Thanks!

I would recommend reformatting the Urls for  pages that have lost rankings. Then, just choose a few of the pages that retained their rank to try hyphens instead of + sign. Track them. If they improve, then do the rest of them. If they decline, remove the 301 redirects and return them to what they were and leave the rest of them as is.

Dana

Hi Greg,

I have a follow up question. Because these pages are being dynamically generated from the base URL, the only place to put the meta no index tag would be on the parent URL, which of course we don't want to do because it needs to be indexed. Can we add these individual URLs [just the ones with origin codes]  to the robots.txt file?

Dana

Thanks very much to you both. This is super helpful!

Hi all,

I posted this in the GWT Forum on Monday and still no answers so I will try here. Our URL is http://www.ccisolutions.com 
We have over 200 pages on our site being flagged by GWT as having
duplicate title tags. The majority of them look similar to this:

Title: <a>JBL EON MusicMix 16 | Mixer | CCI Solutions</a>

GWT is reporting these URLs to have all the same title:

/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Category/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Footer/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Header/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?origin=../StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?origin=GoogleBase

These are all the same page. There was a time when we used these origin codes, but we stopped using them over a year ago. We also added canonical tags to every page to prevent us from having duplicate content issues. However, these origin codes are
still showing up in GWT. Is there anything we can do to fix this problem. Do we have a technical issue with our site code and the way Google is seeing our dynamic URLs? Any suggestions on how we can fix this problem? The same is true in our report for Meta descriptions. Thanks
you,
Dana Tan

Thanks to Daniel and EGOL for the recommendation. I have submitted a request for a quote. Can anyone else make a recommenation so I have at least a couple of alternatives? I know management is going to want to know that I looked at several people before making a recommendation

Thanks for the recommendation Daniel. I'm a little concerned that they appear to be an SEO firm but their site says "Site Under Construction." We are looking for someone with a lot of experience. I am going to contact them for a quote and perhaps I can find out how experienced their developers are when I talk to them.

We are an e-commerce site, http://www.ccisolutions.com running on an obscure Web store coded for us by a small company called Assist, located in Utah. We believe we have numerous problems with our code that are negatively impacting our SEO. One such problem, the current meta refresh on our homepage, is in the process of being fixed (Thanks to Jenn Lopez at SEOMoz for helping me convince management it was important enough to pay the $ for the fix!). However, I believe there could be numerous other issues. I am the SEO strategist, but I am not a coder beyond basic HTML and CSS. Can anyone recommend a highly qualified Web developer who's strong in SEO that we might hire to do an audit of our code, including recommendations on how to fix anything that might be discovered as a problem?

Thanks JLo. Loved your presentation at MozCon. This is exactly the kind of article I needed. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

Look at http://www.ccisolutions.com  After the meta refresh takes place the homepage URL looks like this: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain  I am trying to convince management that it is worth spending $1,000 with our current provider to get it fixed. It is my understanding that this meta refresh could be preventing the value of our homepage from being passed down to our category pages, etc. Can anyone give me something concrete that I can use to convince management that the fix is worth $1,000? Or is it not worth fixing?

Thanks Nakul - Yes, that is an issue too. Do you think it's the same problem preventing Google bot from accessing other category and product pages like this one - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/DIG-VENUESC48.prod  which produces this when fetching as Google Bot in Webmaster tools::

`HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:07:48 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.7a DAV/2 PHP/5.2.4 mod_jk/1.2.25
Set-Cookie: CCISolutions-UT-Status=66.249.72.113.1327536468869708; path=/; expires=Sat, 25-Jan-14 00:07:48 GMT; domain=.ccisolutions.com
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=53DED9D79638EFE72D2288D65B4DA7D2; Path=/StoreFront
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1

In other words, do you think the root of the problem is that our
homepage is not really http://www.ccisolutions.com, but it is` http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain ?

Or is there more than one problem here?

When I go to Google Webmaster tools and I type in any URL from the site http://www.ccisolutions.com  in the "Fetch as Google Bot" feature, and then I click the link that says "success," Google bot is seeing my pages like this:

<code>HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 19:11:50 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.7a DAV/2 PHP/5.2.4 mod_jk/1.2.25
Set-Cookie: CCISolutions-UT-Status=66.249.72.55.1303845110495128; path=/; expires=Thu, 25-Apr-13 19:11:50 GMT; domain=.ccisolutions.com
Last-Modified: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:36:45 GMT
ETag: "314b26-5a-2d421940"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 90
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html

Any clue as to why this could be happening?</code>